I've worked on a few different games and the one thing they've all had in common is that they are all still fun when you carve them back to their basic core loo

I've worked on a few different games and the one thing they've all had in common is that they are all still fun when you carve them back to their basic core loop. If your project wasn't fun at its core, it's unlikely to be fun when you've wrapped it in layers of other features